Norway has deported 1,600 Somalis because the situation in their home country has improved.
The Norwegian government did review around 1,400 cases involving people from Somalia who had been granted refugee status in Norway, to assess if conditions in their home country had changed to such an extent that they no longer needed international protection. But a government spokesperson said “very few” of these cases actually saw their refugee status revoked.
A post shared on Facebook states: “NORWAY DEPORTS 1600 SOMALIS, WHY CAN’T WE?”
It continues “The Norwegian government decided that over 1,600 Somalians should leave as the situation back in their home country has improved”.
This post is missing context. While it is true that several years ago the Norwegian government reviewed whether the refugee status of around 1,400 Somalians could be revoked because the situation in their home country had improved, most of the people in these cases did not see their refugee status revoked.
It’s worth noting that it’s not clear whether the post is intending to refer to “Somalis”—an ethnic group from the Somali peninsula—or “Somalians”—people from Somalia (of which the majority are Somalis).
A spokesperson for Norway’s Directorate of Immigration confirmed to Full Fact that it was instructed in 2016 to review cases involving people from Somalia who had been granted refugee status in Norway and assess if conditions in their home country had changed to such an extent that they no longer needed international protection.
They said that the review involved more than 1,400 cases. However “very few of these cases ended in cessation of their refugee status.”
The Directorate said it was unable to confirm the exact number of cases involving Somalians whose refugee status was revoked following the review, but did provide us with figures showing the total number of forced returns to Somalia.
These figures show that between 2018 and 2022, a total of 142 people were forcibly returned to Somalia.
It is important to note that we do not know how many of these returns were a result of the review mentioned above. This figure may also include, for example, people deported after having committed criminal offences, as well as people who refused to leave Norway voluntarily after their application for a residency permit was rejected.
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The Facebook post also claims that “50% of Norway’s welfare is spent on immigrants”.
While the post does not provide a source for this claim, the Norwegian fact checking organisation Faktisk pointed us to data from Statistics Norway which shows that 56% of social assistance payments in 2019 went to immigrants.
When we contacted Statistics Norway about the claim, it told us that this data was not necessarily updated each year. It did direct us to an article which looked at the characteristics of social assistance recipients. This stated that approximately 40% of social assistance recipients in 2022 had Norway listed as their “country background”.
This data shows that, outside of Norwegians and those whose country background was not listed (9.2%), Ukrainians accounted for the largest group of social assistance recipients (7.5%), followed by Syrians (7.0%) and Somalians (6.3%).
Image courtesy of Mikita Karasiou
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because while the Norwegian government did review around 1,400 cases involving people from Somalia who had been granted refugee status in Norway, to assess if conditions in their home country had changed to such an extent that they no longer needed international protection, “very few” of these cases actually saw their refugee status revoked.
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